


Black Lives Matter

by Glory1863



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Current Events, Gen, Introspection, Race
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 18:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6125310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glory1863/pseuds/Glory1863
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Early morning TV news in Chicago.  It sure isn't news to Derek Morgan:  It's what he and his family have always known.  If black lives matter, he has to wonder sometimes to whom.  And does his fellow agent, Spencer Reid, even have a clue?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Lives Matter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LillithsGarden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LillithsGarden/gifts).



> I've had this fic on my hard drive for months and finally decided to post it after reading LillithsGarden's essay on how race affects the character of Derek Morgan. As a white woman living in Chicagoland, I'm still not sure that it's my place to comment, much less my story to tell.

Derek Morgan was sitting at the foot of his bed in his room at the Westin-Yorktown Center in Lombard, about 20 miles west of Chicago.  His go bag was packed and ready beside him (and had been for the past 15 minutes), but his roommate, Spencer Reid, was still messing about with his hair and still needed to pack his bag.  This was one of the reasons why Morgan hated rooming with Reid when they were working a case.

To pass the time, Morgan turned on the TV. The local early morning news shows were on in Chicago.  Here’s a sample of what he saw:

CBS-2 lead with a story about 4 black teens being shot in a drive-by at What The Hell? o’clock in the morning (Morgan’s thought, not necessarily the reporter’s) down on 63rd Street.  Some made it to Stroger-Cook County Hospital – a great place to be either a medical resident because you’d see things there you normally wouldn’t outside of a third-world country or a surgical resident because you’d get more experience with gunshot wounds than some fully trained surgeons did in a MASH unit.  Some of the teens, though, bypassed the new hospital for the neighborhood of the old.  The Cook County Medical Examiner’s office was right down the street.

Over at NBC-5, the story was of a shooting at a house party somewhere down in the “Southlands” in a predominantly black town in the crumbling inner ring of Chicago suburbs that had lost their industrial base decades ago and were among the poorest places in America. There was 1 dead and 13 others wounded.  The reporter was standing outside Advocate-Christ Medical Center, the trauma center in Oak Lawn, the only one for the far south side of the city and its southern suburbs.  Its service area covered a large geographic region such that just getting there could drastically cut into the “golden hour”, especially with bad weather and/or bad traffic.  When they were on trauma bypass, Morgan knew you could pretty much kiss your life goodbye.  

Moving on to ABC-7 and their Eyewitness News, the story was about a funeral for a young black teen who was headed to basketball practice with his twin brother when they were accosted by a group of other black teens. Someone in the group wanted the Columbia jacket belonging to one of the twins.  The boy refused to give it up – his single mother had worked long and hard to buy it for him – so he was shot dead.  Morgan didn’t like to dwell on how back in the day that could have been him.  Not that the thought would ever totally slip his mind – even without an eidetic memory like Reid’s – but he had decided long ago that it didn’t pay to obsess over it.  He’d dealt with too many Unsubs who couldn’t make that compartmentalization. 

Chicago’s Very Own, WGN, channel 9, the superstation the rest of the country knew for broadcasting Cubs games, urged viewers to stay tuned for an in-station interview with the Reverend Jesse Jackson of Operation PUSH.  Morgan knew he’d heard it all before and hit the clicker.  He respected the man for the work he’d done years ago with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., but lately it seemed like Jackson loved the cameras and an open microphone a bit too much for their own sake.  

Over on WTTW (Window to the World), channel 11, the PBS station for Chicago, they were re-running last night’s edition of _Chicago Tonight_.  This particular segment dealt with a black serial killer who’d dumped black women’s bodies in abandoned homes in majority black Gary, Indiana.  Aaron Hotchner was one of the panelists, but that wasn’t the reason the BAU team was in Chicago.  At the request of the Chicago field office of the FBI, with perhaps just a bit of a push from the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, they were after the Bandit in the ‘Burbs who’d robbed 18 banks in 3 years, some branches more than once.  Morgan found it depressing.  Sure, bank robbery was illegal, but all the talent of his team was being directed at catching a guy who had only stolen money, not lives.  It was wrong.  Just wrong.  Morgan wondered what a black life was going for now.  Bank robber’s total take divided by the current body count.  Morgan knew Reid could do the math instantly, but could he make the connection? 

The final stop was Fox-32. One look, and Morgan hit the “off” button with a vengeance.  “I don’t need a bunch of old, fat-ass, white dudes telling me that if black lives really mattered, we’d stop shooting each other.”

Reid gulped and straightened his tie. His hair was as neat as it was going to be for the day, and his bag was packed and slung over his shoulder.  He could give Morgan statistics on police versus black shootings, but his colleague already knew those, and they weren’t good, no matter how much the CPD and the Mayor’s Office tried to sweep it under the rug.  Reid found it seriously disturbing to imagine a younger Morgan as a victim, lying dead in the street because a heavily armed white officer felt “threatened” by a black teen’s overactive mouth, but he didn’t feel comfortable bringing that up.  No matter how hard he tried or what his intent was, he always ended up putting his foot in his mouth, hence his preference for numbers, percentages and standard deviations.  Hard data didn’t make judgments.  So, he could give Morgan the latest information on white versus black crime.  Not negligible, but not at the level most whites thought it was, either.  But black versus black crime – that was the worst.  Morgan already knew that, too, and it “pissed him off” as Reid had heard him say more than once.  In the end, Reid decided that Morgan didn’t need to hear any comments, numerical or otherwise, from a young, skinny-ass, white guy, either.

“Uh, Morgan, you want to get some breakfast? We still have time before we have to catch the Metra.”


End file.
